SAP Splash – design better experiences Details

In the enterprise world, 70% of apps that are deployed are not adopted (per Forrester research) as they are difficult to use. The business experts or IT Specialists, who are busy shipping solutions, often end up putting together the user interfaces. While they’re experts in their business domains, they’re still novices in the design process. This mismatch unfortunately results in inefficiently functioning and crude looking business apps, which is a far cry from the consumer-grade user experience that people have come to expect.

SAP Splash makes it easy for business experts to create applications that make their end-users super happy. We provide a gallery of inspiration where they can simply pick a project, clone it, and then build upon the work already done. For those who want to really understand their users, we provide prototype and validation tools. This allows constant feedback making our users more mindful of their users. For business experts hungry for a deeper knowledge of design, we invite them to take advantage of our bite-sized learning material on design methods. We empower enterprises to scale design with the ability to create a private gallery of internal projects while leveraging their own design guidelines.

With Splash, business experts can use simple tools to create interactive prototypes with realistic sample data. More accurate user feedback can be captured to jumpstart their development process. Additionally, UIs that are inline with today’s best practices can be built and gracefully ease the business expert into the discipline of human centered design.

Our goal is to empower the business experts at enterprises to think like designers and be mindful of their users. With SAP Splash, we can all imagine a world where historically dull enterprise software becomes like consumer apps: simple, delightful and intuitive.

Why this project is worthy of a UX Award:

Companies are now becoming aware, in the enterprise world, that user experience is a strategic differentiator. Forrester research states that 93% of Line of Business and IT Executives rate user experience as a top strategic priority. However, since this is a relatively new business discipline, these organizations lack the skillset or the budget to hire design experts.
SAP is in a unique position to deliver on this promise and disrupt the market. Since 2004, SAP made a deep commitment to the end user. We have scaled our own scarce design talent and up skilled our own employees to sprout a design culture within SAP. We have also been helping many of our customers do the same with our own design consultancy. Today, the enterprise IT industry is on the same UX journey SAP began over 10 years ago.
SAP Splash empowers organizations to scale thoughtful design. During our product design journey, we conducted rounds of generative research, contextual inquiries, participatory design sessions and usability testing. Through these sessions, we reframed the problem several times focusing on the marketing home page so that the final concept is easily conveyed and understood.
A key need we discovered was that our users wanted something hands-on rather than pure theory. This marked a critical point in our process when coming up with lightweight design method cards following the design principle of learning by doing.

Intensive brand studies resulted in a direction that expressed strength with an organic and flexible quality. Further, we paid special attention to content with an approachable but playful tone.

Our goal is to empower the business experts at enterprises to think like designers and be mindful of their users. With SAP Splash, we can all imagine a world where historically dull enterprise software becomes like consumer apps: simple, delightful and intuitive.